Saturday’s UFC event at the Golden-1 Center in Sacramento put a lot of egg on the faces of management.

The marketing and hype packages by Foxified TV consultants in conjunction with WME certainly felt different than the Lorenzo Fertitta-era UFC. UFC went all-in on Paige VanZant. They treated viewers as children by hyping VanZant for going to multiple high schools and filming a Bissell commercial at age 13. There was the nauseating Erin Andrews interview spot. Fox Sports 1 spent the whole week focusing on VanZant, including PVZ not wanting to fight in front of her mother because she bled during fights. And right on cue, Fox aired a 4G LTE commercial with Paige VanZant after VanZant’s fight ended.

The problem, of course, is that VanZant got choked out and destroyed by Michelle Waterson. It was an adult vs. a child in the cage. Waterson was in the main event and you wouldn’t have known it until fight night. Someone from production was barking at Waterson to hurry her ring walk by giving second-by-second instructions. She was viewed as the B-side of the main event by the powers-that-be. Of course they would treat Michelle Waterson like that.

The bloodletting continued with Sage Northcutt getting worked over by CM Punk slayer Mickey Gall. Fox hyped Northcutt as being discovered by Dana White on his Fight Pass show looking for a fighter. The prodigal son got beat up. It’s a good thing the focus was on Dana discovering this young man. Too bad Dana wasn’t actually there on camera to watch the festivities.

Dana White and Joe Rogan were nowhere to be found for Urijah Faber’s retirement fight. It’s entirely valid to point out that Faber was not a Dana creation and became his own star outside of the UFC universe. Even by that measure, White not showing up on camera to pay respects to Faber sent a rather interesting message to the fans at home. Faber was the clear cut star on this show along with Nick Diaz getting his ringside cameo.

Faber had a chance to submit Brad Pickett in round one of their fight but couldn’t pull it off. I joked that Skip Bayless would give a hot take on Fox saying that WEC Faber would have finished the fight but that UFC Faber just didn’t have the clutch gene to do it. An hour later, Fox was airing a Skip Bayless hot take skeptical of Ronda Rousey having success upon her return in two weeks to fight Amanda Nunes. It was the basest of Jamie Horowitz plays and to the average viewer came across as a copy of the horrible Monday Night Football half-time First Take shoutfest between Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman.

And to cap off the WME Foxified TV consultant crapfest, UFC went into promo mode with a one-sided insult fest between Dominick Cruz and Cody Garbrandt. Another man vs. child scenario, this time on the microphone.

Speaking of childish, California State Athletic Commission main athletic inspector and Andy Foster point man Mark Relyea was in his camera-hogging glory by getting in on the TV shots before and after the Urijah Faber fight. Nobody is a bigger mark for Mark than Mark himself.

If this is what the WME era of UFC on Fox is going to be, the folks at Viacom should be very, very happy with their growing position.

1. Right now UFC 207 only has 4 fights for the PPV. If that stands, it will be the fewest number of fights on a Main Event PPV card in the history of the UFC. Talk about screwing fans over with less….

2. The use of Interim wasn’t great during the Zuffa era. It is already becoming a joke in the WME era. Holloway vs. Pettis for a belt was bad enough. Now there are rumors that Khabib vs. Ferguson might be for an Interim belt, despite the fact that Connor is perfectly healthy and will fight within a year.

Even my elderly mother was pissed that they were rushing Waterson to the cage. She even said “Aren’t they going to talk about the other girl?” And my mother watched Van Zant’s last fight with me and she loved the jumping KO kick.

She asked me “Who do we want to win?” I said “I’m pulling for Michelle, you can cheer for whoever you want.” 😉

She also thought Garbrandt was obnoxious during his interview.

I picked Gall to beat Northcutt, and again, it DID seem like they have become more interest in pushing “IDOLS” instead of giving even coverage.

While I agree with your article, It was early Christmas for me, and I got what I wanted… Sunny Jim and Jill schooled fooled and choked the f out.

But that’s not what I typically watch MMA for is it?
Back in the day, most everyone wanted to see bullies like tank or hess get rolled up. Now I want to see nice polite pretty teenagers get their a$$ handed to them?!!?

The ufc is again lowering the bar for what passes for Ultimate fighting.
UFCs first lowering occurred back in the Arlovski vs Buentello days in what I called the wal-martization of the ufc. Pride had the good fighters and UFC was looking like something from UFCs dark days from 20-29.

Then UFC got it together for a while after getting pride. But the second lowering would come when they bought every other promotion and began putting on too many cards with lesser fighters.

Through these times of lowered expectations the UFC created few stars. GSP is pretty much it, Penn Jones a couple others were failed stars. RR is the ugliest failed star you never want to look at. Conner is legitimately the only star UFC has/helped created.

Now they are slapping star labels onto any new pretty face, regardless their fighting skill.
While the real stars like Faber are unceremoniously broomed out of the spotlight.

I really miss Bjorns Bellator, it treated MMA as the real sport. Sure the tournaments had some PVZ and Sage type clinkers, but they always got eliminated in the first round and we wouldn’t have to see them again, and definitely not headlining a show.

Pages and sages are happy go lucky media personalities, not REAL fighters. Why would you even fight if you were privileged whitey? too stupid to realize they suck? Are they listening to the UFC hype and believing it? Is it the easy money? Regardless they are promoting fashion over function, and fad over fighting.

I forgot to say how cringeworthy the commentating was during the main… “man Page is tough” while shes getting choked out. Any other fight it would be “Watterson has that choke tight” “pvz has no answer for it” Felt bad for the commentators for lying like that, they must sit in the shower and cry after cashing their checks. The thing is karate hottie isn’t all that great of a fighter either, yet she made PVZ look stupid.

But…

“I was meant for the spotlight, and I’m going to continue to be in the spotlight,” VanZant

she sucks bad, she’ll never learn… she was going for that pathetic hip toss again!!

Correct.
Watterson was is very good, and she is hotter than monkey face van sant.
We haven’t seen Watterson for some time, and pvz isnt a real “test”, so I have reservations with calling her great after a year off…but she did look great against pvz.

They popped a rating on Faber’s retirement and destruction of two young stars in PVZ and Northcutt.

Yes, the rating will be nice when WME shops UFC around for a new TV deal and cashes out afterwards. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory and insight on things to come with Fox controlling production & storylines.

So I just read Kevin Iole’s article on how the ratings peaked at 4.8 million for the main event.

It mentions how Dana White praised Northcutt and Gall because he discovered them on Looking for a Fight (I do enjoy the show), and PVZ, mentioning how they all have that “star quality about them”… ZERO mention of Waterson,other than the opening sentence.

This is a failure on BOTH White’s part as well as Iole: she just won the Main Event of one of the highest rated Fight Night on FOX shows,…Why the hell aren’t they hyping her up, to at least a reasonable minimum?

The poor treatment of Watterson, and her total dismissal after such a dominant victory could easily be seen as racism. So keeping her down amy be a success as far as they are concerned.
Also… funny, now that the ufc is owned by an Israeli jew, Rousey’s back muscles look like challah bread.

#1 Daley and High were cut for the same things baroni and nelson were fined for. I have noticed white fighters with losing records tend to hang around longer than black losers.
#2 I haven’t looked at the numbers so im not sure whats going on there. But not too many black fighters in the ufc for sure.
#3 That’s correct. The new owners have less respect for the sport than the frattatas. Using ufcs violent spectacle not only as cash cow, but as a vehicle for hyping their inherently racist and facist political ideology.

Guess we know why ufc didnt mention the werd cain fight, because they knew it wasn’t happening. We know who calls the shots with the nsac, Cain just got punished for joining mmaaa. Werdum also will NOT be making any coin on a huge ppv, for mouthing off to reebok. I bet they drop Kennedy after that loss and tuck Dillashaw away on some fightpass cards from now on. Cowboy will still get the good fights so long as he rats out his associates to his dad Dana.

Poor big rigg. looking pretty shot last couple of days.
UFCs early weigh ins aren’t doing anything.They need to just do a major move to eliminate the weight cutting bs.

I propose going bigger, eliminating Mighty mouse’s division(whatever its called), adding a cruiser weight 205-220 division and simply moving everyone up one weight class. First you’d want to know the weights of all fighters when they enter the cage. Maintaining that weight within ten lbs one month away from fight night should be the rule. This way fighters cannot cut more than 10 lbs the night of or right before the fight.